Movies from Neil Gaiman

The Booksellers

What once seemed like an esoteric world now seems essential to our culture: the community of rare book dealers and collectors who, in their love of the delicacy and tactility of books, are helping to keep the printed word alive. D.W. Young’s elegant and entertaining documentary, executive produced by Parker Posey, is a lively tour of New York’s book world, past and present, from the Park Avenue Armory’s annual Antiquarian Book Fair, where original editions can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars; to the Strand and Argosy book stores, still standing against all odds; to the beautifully crammed apartments of collectors and buyers. The film features a litany of special guests, including Fran Lebowitz, Susan Orlean, Gay Talese, and a community of dedicated book dealers who strongly believe in the wonder of the object and the everlasting importance of what’s inside.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
It's marvelous!!
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Lucky Day

Red, a safe cracker who has just been released from prison, is trying to hold his family together as his past catches up with him in the form of Luc, a psychopathic contract killer who's seeking revenge for the death of his brother.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I really want to see this. When @avary first told me about it, it was a sequel to Killing Zoe, a film I still love. It became its own thing, and it has @CrispinGlover in it.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Killing Zoe

Zed is an American vault-cracker who travels to Paris to meet up with his old friend Eric. Eric and his gang have planned to raid the only bank in the city which is open on Bastille day. After offering his services, Zed soon finds himself trapped in a situation beyond his control when heroin abuse, poor planning and a call-girl named Zoe all conspire to turn the robbery into a very bloody siege.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I really want to see this. When @avary first told me about it, it was a sequel to Killing Zoe, a film I still love.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Penn & Teller Get Killed

Penn & Teller enjoy playing jokes on each other. When Penn says on an interview show that he wishes he has someone threatening his life so that he "wouldn't sweat the small stuff," each of them begins a series of pranks on the other to suggest a real threat. Then they find that a real psychopath is interested in them.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Still a remarkable film. The going through the metal detector gag. The pigeon catch...
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life

Franz Kafka has been stricken with a serious case of writer's block on Christmas Eve. He's trying to get started on his latest short story, "The Metamorphosis", but he isn't sure what his protagonist Gregor Samsa should become. As Kafka struggles with indecision, he has to contend with a loud holiday party downstairs, several unexpected guests, and a sinister knife salesman who has a bone to pick with him.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I suddenly realised that there are people out there who have Never Seen "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life" the film that won director Peter Capaldi (the same one, yes) an Oscar.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Missing Link

The charismatic Sir Lionel Frost considers himself to be the world's foremost investigator of myths and monsters. Trouble is, none of his small-minded, high-society peers seems to recognize this. Hoping to finally gain acceptance from these fellow adventurers, Sir Lionel travels to the Pacific Northwest to prove the existence of a legendary creature known as the missing link.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
This is Ash's favourite film. I loved it too...
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Alice

A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare- no matter how twisted or odd that way must be. A memorably bizarre screen version of Lewis Carroll’s novel ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
What I find fascinating about Alice is that on the one hand, it's profoundly nightmarish," Gaiman says of the film, in which a mostly live-action young girl wanders through a landscape of animated skulls, socks and pieces of meat. "But the film also, whatever it says about my family, I brought it home on video the moment it came out, and my then 3-year-old daughter, it became her favorite film ... I think, particularly in my daughter Holly's case, I forgot to mention to her that it was supposed to be scary, and she just saw it as a wonderful animation of Lewis Carroll's Alice."
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Time Bandits

Young history buff Kevin can scarcely believe it when six dwarfs emerge from his closet one night. Former employees of the Supreme Being, they've purloined a map charting all of the holes in the fabric of time and are using it to steal treasures from different historical eras. Taking Kevin with them, they variously drop in on Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon before the Supreme Being catches up with them.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
It's "basically a film about a small boy who discovers that his bedroom is a hole leading to the rest of the universe, and as he is invaded by a number of dwarfs, escaping God with a map to everything ... it's a glorious feat of imagination." Terry Gilliam's work is "always about pushing the bounds of imagination," Gaiman says.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

The Bride of Frankenstein

Bride of Frankenstein begins where James Whale's Frankenstein from 1931 ended. Dr. Frankenstein has not been killed as previously portrayed and now he wants to get away from the mad experiments. Yet when his wife is kidnapped by his creation, Frankenstein agrees to help him create a new monster, this time a woman.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those dream-films. It exists in the culture as a unique thing, magical and odd: a lurching story sequence as ungainly and as beautiful as the monster itself, that culminates in a couple of minutes of film that have seared themselves onto the undermind of the world.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Bedazzled

Stanley is infatuated with Margaret, the statuesque waitress who works with him. He meets George Spiggott AKA the devil and sells his soul for 7 wishes, which Stanley uses to try and make Margaret his own first as an intellectual, then as a rock star, then as a wealthy industrialist. As each fails, he becomes more aware of how empty his life had been and how much more he has to live for.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I felt like that was of the same DNA as the thing that we were doing … Also Bedazzled, the original Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Bedazzled, which again has a lot of the DNA of Good Omens in it.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

A Matter of Life and Death

When a young airman miraculously survives bailing out of his aeroplane without a parachute, he falls in love with an American radio operator. But the officials in the other world realise their mistake, and dispatch an angel to collect him.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
But, I thought about A Matter of Life and Death, which was a film that was enormously inspirational when making Good Omens.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Way Out West

Stan and Ollie try to deliver the deed to a valuable gold mine to the daughter of a dead prospector. Unfortunately, the daughter's evil guardian is determined to have the gold mine for himself and his saloon-singer wife.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, because I thought that would be a wonderful choice, and it does have, to my mind, the finest dance in the whole of film.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Ran

With Ran, legendary director Akira Kurosawa reimagines Shakespeare's King Lear as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan. Majestic in scope, the film is Kurosawa's late-life masterpiece, a profound examination of the folly of war and the crumbling of one family under the weight of betrayal, greed, and the insatiable thirst for power.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I’ve jotted down a bunch of things I thought, well Ran is a possibility. I love Akira Kurosawa‘s take on King Lear, I love what he did to it. I love the movement, the battles. You know, there’s nothing about that film I do not enjoy.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Beauty and the Beast

The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
But eventually I came down on Belle et la bête, [Jean] Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. I remember watching it and feeling transported. For me, it’s like dreaming.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

His Girl Friday

Hildy, the journalist former wife of newspaper editor Walter Burns, visits his office to inform him that she's engaged and will be getting remarried the next day. Walter can't let that happen and frames the fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, for one thing after another, to keep him temporarily held in prison, while trying to steer Hildy into returning to her old job as his employee.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
I’d go for His Girl Friday. There’s just that Howard Hawks rapid dialogue, the glory of Cary Grant [at his] most Cary Grant-ish. It’s funny. It moves, it actually has huge social responsibility, and they did a thing where they gender-swapped the lead.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

Drowning by Numbers

An ironic black comedy of love and death that takes place an a lyrically beautiful landscape. Three related women, all named Cissie Colpitts share a solidarity for one another which brings about three copy-cat drownings. The local coroner is in love with all three women and helps to disguise the murders.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
Beautiful performances and beautifully filmed, and just one of those places where, as far I am concerned I wish there was so much more cinema like that, but there doesn’t seem to be.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

All That Jazz

Joe Gideon is at the top of the heap, one of the most successful directors and choreographers in musical theater. But he can feel his world slowly collapsing around him - his obsession with work has almost destroyed his personal life, and only his bottles of pills keep him going.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack.
Movies from Neil Gaiman

if....

Satire about a traditional English boys' boarding school, where social hierarchy reigns supreme and power remains in the hands of distanced and ineffectual teachers and callously vicious prefects in the Upper Sixth. But three Lower Sixth students, leader Mick Travis, Wallace and Johnny decide on a shocking course of action to redress the balance of privilege once and for all.
Neil Gaiman
Writer, Screenwriter
The first one would be Lindsay Anderson’s If… It’s a film that I love because it allows me sometimes try and explain what it was like to be a kid at an English Public School — I was a scholarship boy in the early 1970s — late ’60s where you were in — even though it’s set earlier than that and was made earlier than that — you were in a culture that hasn’t changed.